I for one care more about less stress, less inequality, etc. and decided that the Bay Area is not for me.
Sure if you want to work at an early stage startup, you can grind yourself into a paste. But there are plenty of jobs here where that's not the case.
The insane commutes, the work culture, the high rent / COL, the culture of trying to look as rich/smart/successful as possible, the sue happy people, the fact that there's absolutely nothing else to do other than work, etc really wore down on me.
I lived in the south bay though... admittedly it seemed slightly better in SF. Less money grobbing and more hipsters. But it looks like all that is going out the window very quickly. The south bay culture is spreading like a cancer.
I'm also mystified at the assertion that SF would be better in this respect. The conventional view is that SF is more status seeking and elitist while the South Bay neighborhoods are more laid back, or at least more diverse in their subgroup compositions.
The cost of living is insane, yes, although astronomical tech salaries entirely compensate for you and me. (Sucks for people who work retail though, and schoolteachers, police etc.)
As far as SF goes, I was talking about 5-6 years ago. I've heard its way worse these days. And it's going to keep getting worse, because the south bay is a cancer. It wasn't until I moved away when I realized that.
I'm glad things worked out for you in any case.
I don't think I'm getting my point across correctly. Sure. There are niches in the bay area that are great, and I'm sure I'd meet many interesting people there, if I decided to stay.
However, there's a certain point where enough is enough. It's not like this problem I'm describing is just the effect of a one-off bubble that will go away soon. It is going to get worse and worse; like it has always been. Housing prices / COL are going to go up and people are going to be constantly forced out of their homes and have to relocate and compromise. If you fuck up in your career or make one bad move with your finances, you are done. Bye bye bay area. If it doesn't happen to you it will definitely happen to your friends. It's just a horrible existence and I am honestly baffled you don't see this despite living there your whole life. The only way I could conceive of you not seeing this is if you and your friends have something like $2M saved up and don't need to worry about finances.
Oh god, you really quantified the cruft that made me hate the place. The bay is sublime in its beauty but could only be perfect for me if the population was subbed out for Austin's or DC's (which are in many ways opposite, but they're also far more distant from SFBay than they are from each other).
This is why I chose not to live here after graduation.
It's given me a very cynical view on life. I really don't know where else to move, I feel like I need to leave the country as well, or at least leave California. Where are you going, if you don't mind me asking?
> I lived in the south bay though
Well, yeah
For me, it's mostly been great.
It's been worthwhile and we do plenty of stuff, but you have to be prepared to drive very long distances to see anyone. And many people who don't get into tech move away, so practically everyone is younger than me (and male) and can't afford the hipster restaurant visiting hobbies.
Oh, but the commute here is really not that bad compared to other American cities that aren't "world tier" (LA, Atlanta, DC) because those cities refuse to build mass transit.
I'm assuming you've never paid us a visit :( DC literally has the second largest mass transit system in the country.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_United_States_rapid_tr...
It's sad that in the US, you have to take what you can get, and the reasons why the US doesn't have good public transportation have been discussed here ad nauseum, so I won't even flog that dead horse again.
I've only ridden the Metro once, yeah.
I remember reading a piece about alcoholism where it was describing an alcoholic who concluded that everyone drinks a great deal and just doesn't admit it because that was what their social circle was like. I rarely drink alcohol and have known plenty of people like me, so, no, not everyone drinks.
Most people suffer confirmation bias. We look for confirmation of what we believe to be true about a thing. It is unusual for someone to actively seek more objective data and try to determine what the actual truth is. Most of us default to trying to fit the world to our preconceived notions of it.
The culture of the South Bay is relatively non-existent outside of small pockets like Palo Alto, Los Gatos, Mountain view, and maybe Santana Row. It's geared toward raising kids and family life in general.
Could you clarify what you mean? Because it sounds like either you are saying "Culture only exists in tiny parts of certain places, no place else in the South Bay even has a culture" (which is utterly nonsensical) or maybe you are saying "People who have kids and put family life first are not part of any culture." (again, a big fat nope).
Culture is a human artifact and although it exists partly out there in the world we create, a big piece of it lives inside us and informs us of the proper way to interact with both other people and the spaces we share. Sometimes, people who decry the lack of culture of an area are telling you more about themselves than about the area.
I was merely sharing my observation that certain areas in the South Bay tend to have more stuff to do (i.e. a downtown). Not sure why you took that as me denigrating parents and families. Perhaps I was being vague.
I agree that culture is something, as you put it, that is kept inside of us. However, people don't exist in a vaccum. We are very much influenced by the environment we live in. Most people don't exist in a cultural vacuum where they don't interact with the larger cultural forces in their environment.
My (admittedly anecdotal) experience has been that the South Bay is primarily a work culture. Having lived both in SF and the South Bay, I can tell you that both are offering very different answers for the same question, regardless of whether or not you are single, married, or have kids.
Yeah, no. Please do not assume that a reply of mine to one of three replies to my actual request for clarification is some kind of commentary on you.
I agree that culture is something, as you put it, that is kept inside of us.
That isn't at all what I said. I said it is a human artifact and part of it is stuff out in the world and part of it is a thing inside us, which is very different from saying it is "only" inside us, which is what your framing strongly suggests you read it to mean. In which case, it is you who are misconstruing my comments.
My (admittedly anecdotal) experience has been that the South Bay is primarily a work culture.
Thank you for clarifying.
But the South Bay is basically suburbia, SJ technically being a "city" notwithstanding. So just like pretty much every other urban area in the US, there's enormously more "culture" (in the Arts, Theater, and Culture section of the newspaper sense) in the city, SF in this case, than in the suburbs.
Boston/Cambridge are exactly the same way. I live well West and like it but if I want to go to see a show or music performance, 95% of the time I'm going to drive into town.
Sure there are disproportionately more workaholics in the area. There are also disproportionately fewer people who work 9-5 then go home and veg out on their couch. To me, the lifestyle here is rich and amazing. Where I grew up, which was in an equally large and cosmopolitan city, it's too cold or too hot for 4-6 months of the year to do much outdoors, salaries weren't high enough for people to routinely go to expensive restaurants or travel, and the geography is nowhere near as beautiful or interesting.
Maybe you should look inward more and take charge of your life; it may be that you're hanging around people who focus entirely on work, and so your perception is skewed.
Campbell also has a nice downtown; while it's not San Jose, it's surrounded by San Jose and is basically the same metro and is VTA-accessible. There's also Saratoga and Los Gatos, but those are further out.
Downtown, I'll grant you, though. San Pedro Square can be OK, and the area nearer the University has some quirky stuff, but it has a ways to go. It's gotten somewhat better over the years, though, and I think BART coming to the area may accelerate that a bit since it can actually be a destination.
But here's one thing I've found: People who really want to have fun find a way. There are small pockets all over the bay. SJ downtown is a little lame but it is getting better
You're overstating the issue. It's not New York or San Francisco, for sure, and we sure do need better rapid transit but you're definitely not an hour and a half from everything cool. You're more like half an hour or so. You just need to look for it.
The South Bay is a residential suburb. It doesn't have much of a nightlife. The same can be said about most of the places people live in this country outside of the densest urban centers.
If that's not what you want, then by all means move. But recognize that this is exactly the sort of stability many people strive hard for.
* Rock climbing * Scuba diving in Monterey * Bicycling on the bay trail * Board gaming clubs * Meetups * Wineries * The boardwalk in Santa Cruz
You can even take an hour train ride straight to SF and spend the day with the snobs and homeless. And then take the same train home to a place that doesn't stink like urine.
Your phrasing is needlessly incendiary and possibly mistaken, since parent says
>> I am young and about to finish school, but I am moving away from the Bay Area and even move to a different country.
But if programming is what you intend to bring as a founder - if it's simply a means to get the burning ideas out of your head and into a product, then there's a much smaller number of places where that will work: San Francisco, Seattle, New York. You need to be able to have coffee with a VC, meet with multiple co-founder options, do a tech meetup and also spend a sizable chunk of the day coding.
If you live near a small city, working that way is an impossibility. You'd have to go to the nearest big city to find that type of collaboration, and the trip will burn through all your coding time, and you still won't have the kind of quality selection that you'd get in NY or SF.
As you say, hacking the rent-salary ratio, which is what the article is about, should be a much smaller factor in how you decide where to live.
San Francisco is a place. Engineering talent is available everywhere, though perhaps most places it isn't so much fish jumping onto the line as in the Bay Area.
What about all the nerds who are Polish, Portuguese, and Peruvian and choose to remain local because their spouses, children, and other interests are? They can still code, some of them are definitely brilliant, and they can either work locally or (more likely) remotely.
Starting a "startup" with venture capital might be next to impossible in Peru, for all I know, but a hell of a lot of folks don't want to exit, don't want to dilute their ownership of their product, and frankly like the environs elsewhere.
Not that I have anything against using out of country programmers, but it's a fact that China does not strongly enforce copyright and does not go out of its way to protect foreign businesses. I don't know about Russia, India, South America, etc, I'd be curious about anybody that's done this sort of thing before. Tim Ferris always talks about it for things like running his support and returns and whatnot.
There are certain restrictions that the Bay Area places on you, like how much money you need to earn, and a particular lifestyle you want to live, in a very specific industry. This is the same as someone going to Houston for Oil, NYC for Finance/Fashion, LA for entertainment, etc. People who live in those places have a particular set of goals - e.g. building big companies (vc or not), doing well on wall street, hitting it big in the movies, etc.
If you don't have those goals, then absolutely - stay where you want to stay. Work remotely. There is a ton of arbitrage in software dev right now, you can make a killing and live in really cheap places. You can literally live like a king. if that is what you want to do.
So it all comes down to your goals, and the Bay Area as a whole is self selecting in that way. If you want to do something more chill in software, that's great. We need more people making money writing code - it's great for the world economy. But you don't need to be in the Bay Area for this (unless you want to).
If you are building a company that needs VC funding. Most companies don't.
"Venture Capital is the wrong source of capital for the vast majority of entrepreneurial ventures" http://avc.com/2005/03/dont_take_the_m/
If you aren't looking to raise VC but instead want to be part of a vibrant tech ecosystem, well, that opens up more mid tier cities. For starters: San Diego, LA, Boulder, Austin, Portland, Pittsburgh(?) in the USA.
But, as for the other 80% that's rent controlled, lots of it is pretty dilapidated, almost borderline 3rd world country in some parts. 1% (7k people) of the SF population is homeless and even more are nearly there (despite over 240 million$ a year spent fighting homelessness).
Perhaps the reason people find SF boring is due to the hollowing out of the middle class.
And if you are into oil/gas, Houston. Marijuana, Colorado or Washington. Cars, Detroit (maybe?). Commodities, Chicago. Ag, Kansas City (maybe?). Outdoor experiences, SLC. Building something for Latin America, Miami. Ets, etc.
I imagine there are many other cities that dominate in niches that I'm missing.
Doesn't make sense. The big 4 have campuses across the country.
Instead of telling people to move to SV I would recommend making sure to get into the right (big 4 or not) team and role for your career. Just fixing bugs at big SV company will not help much. You want to make sure you have a chance to contribute something to show your skills on an innovative or leading team.
- I promise you that's only true as far as your project's priority. For example if Google Maps in Colorado is more important to the company, at the moment, than some other project at HQ, then working on that project at HQ is not better for your career.
- Remember a recruiter is a sales person. Some are honest, some will tell you what serves their own interest.
Yes, but a disproportionate number of their positions are in the bay area. Also, it's much easier to job hop between high-paying companies in the bay area, and this is particularly true if you have a specialization more specific/less common than "web dev" or "iOS dev".
They're called "incidents" at some (enterprise software) bigcos, BTW :) - and tend to be called "defects" in software services companies using software engineering standards like ISO 9000 or SEI CMM.
Juniors or freshers tend to get assigned those for a while. Nothing wrong per se, it helps them learn the codebase, and in some bigcos, the codebases can be pretty big. The same practice is followed in some smallcos too.
The downside is everything is so expensive. Housing, of course. But also everything else too, services, other things. If you can live frugally, it may be to your benefit - you get higher income and keep low spending, win. But if you can't or work lower income job, it may be a problem.
The upside is there are a lot of exciting opportunities around, both in employment and in conferences, lectures, events, etc.
But to your point, there are some great events and conferences which is probably the biggest thing missing from Portland. There are a few good events, but nothing at the scale of what happens in SF.
I thought Portland's, and Oregon's schools in general, are not that good. Unless you are talking about private schools.
Curious about how huge the difference in costs and life-quality might be? Play with https://teleport.org
I'm living in a median cost market in an expensive state and live like a king in comparison to someone in my job (senior tech role) in SFO, although my salary is 50% less. I won't be working for Google anytime soon, but I don't need $500k to live in the lifestyle that I want for my family.
If you want the northern CA lifestyle, wait for the real estate cycle to bust and save some money in a normal place.
I thought PDX was a vibrant (albeit small) tech scene until I moved to Seattle. It was amazing how many more opportunities to meet and learn from interesting people there were across all tech stacks. Having enough friends down in the SF area I get the impression that their scene is even more lively.
As for bigger salaries, I think it's mostly hype. My anecdotal evidence makes me believe that there's likely more opportunities for early stage equity/stock type agreements than you'd find in other places, but my salary has always compared favorably to people in the exact same role living down in the bay- and that's before factoring in the cost of living.
http://www.oregonlive.com/earthquakes/index.ssf/2015/07/the_...
Expanding highways makes traffic worse.
Avoid living or working in brick buildings (they fall apart).
If worried, perhaps avoid high tsunami risk zones (that lack high ground, roads are less useful since they will be unusable during large earthquakes).
If you catalog your risks, earthquake death or disability is probably low in scheme of things.
From my experience, if you work in software with a laptop, earthquakes are not likely to affect your work too much.
Unless you have a neurotic partner, in which case avoid earthquake zones, because they lose the plot when the earth takes control.
Spending time there and experiencing the people and general fast approach to development has definitely help me and my career. It is, mostly, different to the more conservative approach typical used elsewhere. So experiencing the two and being able to use both, when appropriate, is helpful.
After two years we moved back to the UK.
Living and working there was amazing. But, overall it felt like it came at a too huge a cost (financially, work commitment, and commuting).
PS: I do miss being there though. :)
but remember, it's all sorts of a fucked up and competitive out here so be prepared to work your ass off. don't move out here to just make friends.
try it out at. you will miss your friends and your family.